Principal Investigator(s):
Henry Liu, Former Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
Co-Investigators:
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Kathleen Harder, Former Senior Research Associate, College of Design
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David Levinson, Former U of M Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
Project summary:
This research was built upon a recent NSF-funded Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project that aimed to collect perishable travel behavior and traffic data after the collapse of I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN. The goal of this project was to analyze the collected data and develop a firm foundation for travel behavior models that answered three open questions: 1) How do travelers make their trip-making choices in a day-to-day context under network disruption? 2) How do traffic patterns evolve from a state of disequilibrium state toward a state of equilibrium? 3) How should transportation agencies prioritize the allocation of transportation resources in response to the network disruption, particularly during the process of traffic equilibration? Answering these questions is significant to transportation science because the learning process and resulting altered behavior of travelers after severe network disruption has rarely been studied due to data availability. This work benefited many audiences, including undergraduate and graduate students, transportation researchers, and practicing engineers; results from the research will enhance both undergraduate and graduate level courses in transportation engineering, and additional data collected from this project and other related projects will be shared with interested researchers.